The Register has an article about the new Napster-To-Go subscription service I wrote about in my last post. The basic argument is that someone could spent the subscription fee for years and end up with nothing, or buy albums and end up with his own library.
I’m not saying Napster-To-Go will succeed, but the idea behind it will in one format or the other. The basic argument is wrong. The author might also still have a barrel of water in her kitchen still (see my last post) because it assumes the need for ownership of the music files. Why would you want to own anything if one can have access to millions of songs instead? Think of the possibilities of access to any song, all the time. How many times have you bought an album and stopped listening to it after a month? Out of 1000 CD’s I own, I probably only listen to 25 or so on a regular basis. You wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. By analyzing the songs you access and listen to, other artists can be recommended to you. You can sample new artists constantly, for free. Artists can make every concert available. You could listen to a different concert from your favorite artist every day. The possibilities are endless.
Update: Glad I’m not the only one who dissagrees
Lot’s of buzz about the Napster To-Go subscription service. Unlimited access to their catalog for $15/month.
Never mind that people love their Ipods, and never mind about digital rights management technology. What really matters is the way users of music are or aren’t going to store their data. Is it going to be purchase->store such as iTunes or subscription based such as Napster? The best analogy I’ve heard about the subject is one about the way people used to store water before running water existed. I wish I knew where I’ve heard because I’d love to give the person credit.
Before running water, people used to pump water, get it from a river or some other source. They would then store this water in a barrel in their kitchen. When running water became available, the generation who was used to storing water would simply fill their barrel with water from their faucet. The next generation accepted there was no need for water storage in barrels.
Is the same happening to music? Our generation is very used to getting music from a source (a CD shop) and storing it (in huge CD racks). When music became available online, people started downloading and burning. I have friends with 100’s and 100’s of burned CD’s, and now also DVD’s. Now more and more people are storing all this music on their hard drives. Why bother burning it? So will the next step be ‘why bother storing?’. Napsters formula made me think. $15/month for access to whatever I want to hear at any time, or $1/song, or the trouble of finding it on a P2P network that I might only listen to for a while? I don’t need a barrel in my kitchen, the $15/month option is starting to sound pretty good.
Ontario town and country offers getaway packages and ideas.
Interesting website, (hopefully) aimed to promote short haul getaways. I’d say it does the job reasonably well.
VisitScotland has an ancestral website in which people with a Scottish background can trace their family tree.
Great way to attract tourists with Scottisch roots.
I was so exited to hear aboutwww.visitsouthasia.org, a website to promote “Nature, Culture, Adventure” and “Buddhist Heartland”
Unfortunately, it’s a brochure dumped in a Flash website, literally.
www.phuket-photos.com: pictures of the Tsunami devastation and recovery
Help Phuket recover faster by showing how nice is our island TODAY.
The MSN homepage received an interesting makeover with the launch of the new MSN search. It’s a big step toward Web Standards. Not that the homepage validates or anything but it’s a step in the right direction.
My enthusiasm was quickly tempered when I pointed my Firefox browser towards the Advertising Link on the search results screen. A good old “Please Upgrade Your Browser” message appeared. So in order for me to spend my advertising dollars with MSN, I need to meet a technology requirement. That would be like Shell only accepting Fords in their gas stations. It’s ridiculous.
At least call it “Please downgrade your browser” because the suggested browsers aren’t exactly an upgrade.
Microsoft launched its long awaited Search today by adding the beta search to the MSN homepage. Another move in the Search Engine chess game (I’m going to stop calling it wars, because that’s where people die in).
It’s exciting and frustrating all together. Competition is good. It sparks innovation and could drive prices for Search Engine Marketing down. But it also gives us a whole new Search Engine to optimize for and SEM ads to manage if MSN gain market share over Google.
What a bit of competition can accomplish. Definitely an outsider in the Search Engine Battle, A9.com (owned by Amazon.com) continues to do innovative things. They’ve recently launched this crazy new feature called block view. It’s a basic local search, based on the yellow page listings, including search results on a map, but they’ve combined it with photos of the storefront of businesses. And then it let’s you ‘walk’ down the block.
I’m wondering if this is brilliant or one of those, “let’s do it because we can”. Either way, the way they do it is very slick. And how on earth are they planning to keep the pictures up to date? Businesses come and go. We’ll find out.
A better application in my mind would be do drive down all freeways and take pictures of the exits and put them in a driving directions application.
So here’s the plan. I’m going to buy a couple of these spheres, hang them in Stanley Park and fullfill a livelong dream of becoming an elf and live in Lothlorien. Hopefully my wife and cats agree.
While on my trip to London and Amsterdam, the Mozilla foundation released Firefox 1.0. I encourage everybody to download the best browser available at this point and time and help to bring back the browser innovation not seen since the late 90’s.
TiVo is one of those companies that gets it. They looked at the user of TV and recognized a way to enhance their experience by giving them more control over the User Experience of TV. Mike Samsay explains it well in an interview with Engadget:
I installed the new Google Desktop Search today and…WOW. This is amazing. It indexed all 23,000 files. Now, when I Google something, it displays the number of result from my own files plus the top two results. The interface is just like the regular Google results and so far it works like a charm. It seems to give more weight to recent files. Makes sense. It hasn’t been able to index my emails yet. It seems to be a problem with Outlook though, because Outlook has given me some problems lately. When my 75,000 emails are indexed, I will be ecstatic. This is going to make life much easier.